Living Witness(129)

“Are any of these accounts large?” Gregor asked.

“Well, the one for salaries is,” Gary said. “It has to be. We have forty teachers between the three schools, and they’ve got a union  , so that’s not cheap. But we’ve also got the secretaries, the school nurses, an educational psychologist that serves the whole town, and the janitors—that kind of thing.”

“What about sports?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, I forgot about sports,” Gary said. “That was a big deal when I was here. It’s not so much anymore. And then there’s pay to play, which, if you ask me, sucks.”

“Gary,” Sarah said.

“What’s pay to play?” Gregor asked.

“It’s just what it sounds like,” Gary said. “If you want to play sports these days, you have to pay for it. Not the entire cost, but it’s not cheap, and it keeps some kids off the teams because their families just can’t afford it. We don’t have the money in the budget anymore to fund the teams and fund the academic programs at the same time. And the academic programs have gotten really expensive, because now we’ve got No Child Left Behind, and it costs a mint to make sure the kids can pass those tests.”

“How much is it you have to pay to play?”

“One hundred seventy-nine dollars a sport,” Gary said. “It used to be common for guys to play football in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring, but not anymore. It costs close to six hundred dollars to do that. And the kids from the hills, you know, a lot of them can’t come up with even one of those, although Nick Frapp’s people do a good job of raising the cash for at least some of them.”

“I thought Nick Frapp’s people sent their kids to his Christian school,” Gregor said.

“They do,” Gary said, “but it doesn’t go all the way through high school yet. So if they’ve got a kid who wants to play football, they’ll take up a collection. The hill kids who don’t belong to Nick’s church just don’t get to play. They’ve got no incentive at all to stay in school.”

Gregor nodded. Here was a question for the ages, he thought: Where had all the money gone? When he was growing up people were much poorer than they were now. They had smaller houses. They had fewer clothes, and not designer clothes. Things that came from “dry goods” stores. Even so, in those days, you would never have heard of a public school charging its students to play on its sports teams. The whole thing was crazy.

“Mr. Demarkian?” Gary said.

“Sorry,” Gregor said. “I was drifting. What happens to this money that the kids pay into the system? Does it go into this same account for sports activities?”

“The very same one.”

“And is that a lot of money? Is there a lot of money in that account?”

“It depends on what you mean by a lot,” Gary said. “I’d say there was ten thousand or so in it at the beginning of a school year. Less as you go along.”

“And the money churns? There’s a lot of depositing and withdrawing?”

“There’s a lot of that in all the accounts,” Gary said. “There has to be. This is schools we’re talking about. At least during the school year, they’ve got a lot to do.”

“And who keeps the records on the accounts?”

“We’ve got a bookkeeper for the school district,” Gary said. “She’s sixty-five and been with us forever. Mrs. Carstairs. Then we’ve got an accountant in Harrisburg.”

“And how often are the books audited?”

Gary Albright laughed. “If you think somebody is embezzling from the operating budget,” he said, “you can give it up. Franklin Hale is an idiot about a lot of things, but on this he had his head on straight. About five years ago, long before he decided to run for school board, he got the town council to initiate monthly statements. Mrs. Carstairs double-checks everything and then it’s all published in the town paper.”

“It used to drive Franklin crazy, the money that was spent,” Sarah put in. “He’s not really very bright about money, in spite of the fact that he runs a business—”

“It’s Mike who takes care of the money,” Gary said.

“Mike is Franklin’s brother-in-law,” Sarah said. “He and Franklin own the business together. But Franklin would see this money being spent—at the end of the year the reports would say things like ‘fifty thousand dollars for miscellaneous’—and it made him crazy. So he hammered and hammered and got this put through, and now everything is itemized right down to the least little pencil, and it’s all published once a month.”